Florida board lowers FCAT writing test passing score

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TALLAHASSEE — An emergency rule adopted Tuesday will lower the passing grade for Florida’s standardized writing test to keep the failure rate about the same as last year after preliminary results showed it would have dramatically increased otherwise.

The State Board of Education unanimously passed the rule. Without it, only about a third of students would have passed the writing portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT, compared to 80 percent or better last year.

The passing grade will drop from 4 to 3 on a zero-to-six scale. The writing test is given in the fourth, eighth and 10th grades.

“When I saw the dramatic drop in scores, I realized that overnight students all of a sudden didn’t become bad writers,” Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson told the board.

Robinson acknowledged some things “slipped through” the Department of Education but promised they would be corrected. The department failed to sufficiently stress changes in this year’s test to school districts and teachers, he said.

Before the school year, the board increased the cut-off from 3.5 to 4 while also making the test tougher by increasing emphasis on such conventions as spelling, punctuation and capitalization as well as the quality of details used to explain, clarify and define.

Another factor that may have contributed to the lower results was the use of two graders instead of one to score each test, Robinson said.

In response to critics’ calls for an independent investigation, Robinson cited a routine outside audit of testing procedures that’s already under way. He said an internal investigation also will focus on finding out exactly what went wrong.

The state contracts with NCS Pearson to provide and score the FCAT. Florida fined the company two years ago for delays in getting the tests graded.

The lower passing grade doesn’t reduce the test’s rigor, board members said. Most have strong ties to former Gov. Jeb Bush who instituted higher standards and high-stakes testing and continues to advocate for them.

“Optically, a change from 4.0 to 3.0 looks like we are lowering standards, and I for one am against that,” said John Padgett, a Key West businessman who once was Bush’s appointee as Monroe County’s school superintendent. “I’m only voting for this as kind of a hold-harmless for this year only.”

Padgett said “we should not have a surprise” so late in the school year.

Chairwoman Kathleen Shanahan, a former Bush chief of staff, agreed higher standards should remain the goal.

“But there also has to be a time to take a breath and assess how the kids and the districts are doing against the measurement,” Shanahan said.

Patricia Levesque, executive director of Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future, issued a statement praising the board for providing “stability to Florida’s school grading and accountability system.”

The vote came during a conference call after the board heard public comment, much of it critical of Florida’s testing emphasis.

“We are testing our students to death and we are taking instructional time away from teachers to do it,” Flagler County reading coach Mella Baxter said.

Lowering the passing grade “only covers up the problem,” Florida Education Association President Andy Ford said later in a statement. The statewide teachers union opposes standardized tests for grading schools and assessing teachers.

“When Jeb Bush was first elected governor, we pointed out that there was no independent research that says this approach was positive for children or our public schools,” Ford said. “There is still no credible research that says that this testing madness helps educate our children well.”

FCAT reading and math exams similarly are tougher this year. As a result, A-to-F grades for schools are expected to be lower. The grades are used to reward top schools and sanction those that get failing marks. At its regular meeting last week, the board voted not to let any school drop more than one letter grade to soften the blow.

Last year, 81 percent of fourth-graders passed the writing test, but the preliminary results showed that would drop to 27 percent. The emergency rule will keep it at 81 percent.

The rule will result in 77 percent of eighth graders passing compared to 82 percent last year. Without the rule, only 33 percent would have passed.

For 10th grader, it will increase the passing rate from 38 percent to 84 percent. Last year it was 80 percent.

Robinson initially proposed dropping the passing rate only to 3.5, but that would still have resulted in dramatically lower passing rates: 48 percent for fourth grade, 52 percent for eighth grade and 60 percent for 10th grade.

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Lowering the standards is the easy way out of the problem. If writing skills are not improved, what is the point of testing them? And by the way, the people writing these articles could use some writing lessons.

Chief school administrators and representatives of the professional teachers have been truth-talking for at least two academic years and only when the 'cut score' mistake is so egregious or the result created by such a flawed test so great do the general public and representative school boards seem to listen.

Florida's entire k12 public education system has been systematically *hijacked* by a purveyor of political opportunism. You can go back to the roots of how we ever got a State Board of Education or the FCAT tests a full decade ago and you find Jeb Bush.

The late l990's-early 21st century Jeb/John Ellis became Governor promising to 'privitize' the entire public service sector (praying at the beginning of his second term to eliminate all government/civil service workers) and focused his influence in k12 public schooling to perpetuating both the private voucher school model and the 'output driven production function' model based upon FCAT. The 'Levels 1-5 or 1-6' scaling in academic performance judgment and the Grade A-F classification of annual FCAT results profiled by building and district jurisdictions were his model. And the final piece was the substitution of professional teachers and administrators by private testing corporation personnel to administer and interpret test results.

Now, in 2011 and 2012 Jeb Bush has reemerged once again as the 'hiding hand' behind educational politics that range from President Obama calling him a 'national reformer' and securing Race To The Top federal money to expand the 'testing' oversight of Florida's public education to the direct state-level politics of 'packing' members of the State Board of Education ( and selecting a 'reformer' Commissioner) and the Foundation for Florida's Future.

As with Jeb Bush's successful run at governor in the l990's his active political organizations are both 'civic' (regional Forums to Florida foundation) and overtly 'political' (election campaign to Liberty Foundation supporting 2012 candidates) extensions. But unlike the 2000 Governor who helped his brother become President and 'ran' the state during the 2000-2006 mega development frenzy heydays, the 2012 Jeb Bush controls the top of the k12 public education schooling organization (divorced from district superintendents, professional educator organizations but supported by majority of legislature and Rick Scott) and has achieved his dream of privitized testing corporation domination of what 'public education' has come to mean. Pearson/NCS (a British firm) has the FCAT contract and now shares top leadership of the Florida k12 system. Pearson/NCS is in a contract dispute with McGraw Hill over $30million in federal Race to the Top money to build a parallel kinder through twelve grade, end of course test structure to 'complement/supplement' FCAT. And,most important to the new 'privitized' climate of Florida's public education, the FCAT Approved *brand* has now brought in a whole spectrum of EdBiz firms with contracts to do local staff development or select curricular subjects. For example, Jeb's long time friend Bill Bennett and his www.k12.org firm does 'civic' subject ( Mr. Bennett was education secretary for Ronald Reagan and the original l983 'nation at risk' exhortation and coined the 'hijacked' comment). The issue is not whether a local board of education might choose certain 'civic' (or whatever) materials anyway as much as the required prescreening for FCAT legitimacy.

The fundamental conclusion behind the whole decade long experiment with FCAT in Florida is that the test does NOT have an authentic longitudinal history of producing patterns of student achievement. Every time the state changes its private testing firm, adds a subject or grade, changes the 'cut score' or method of evaluating results the FCAT loses that form of 'standardization.' Every time the annual cross-sectional 'snapshot' testing declares a 'national' comparison of achievement we all know the best FCAT can do is 'norm' upon itself. That is why a 'Stanford' section was added, to create an illusion fo that form of 'standardization' and comparing Florida achievment to othre states. In blunter words, if FCAT did not represent such a political investment for the aspiration of those thinking of Jeb Bush's potential futures between now and 2016 and represent the EdBiz opportunities to use FCAT to subsidize private business with public resources it would have died a methodologically inept death some time ago.

What we see with the 2012 Writing results are the death thros struggle of the present State Board of Education and proxy Commissioner trying to keep the FCAT mask in place. When they raised the 'cut scores' on Reading and Math results they were warned about the impact in terms of increased proportions of students failing. Superintendents were worried about retention and dropouts in the student pool while teachers were worried about using FCAT to assess their credibility ('merit' calculation). But the 2012 Writing results for only those students in 4, 8 and 10 grade reveals internal FCAT testing mechanics ( adding two reviewers, adjusting cut off from 4.0 to 3.5 or 3.0) and how silly it is to think about three grades and talk about the Writing progress of the whole k12 'system' of teaching and learning.

The State Board's kneejerk effort to 'save harmless' the system from 2012 revised Writing results only helps to point out that BOTH the FCAT test and the top of the k12 system are deeply flawed. When the reading and math results are profiled with the caveat that 'no school or district can drop more than one grade' the final hypocrisy of using student testing for institutional classifications will be exposed. Perhaps Jeb Bush will be asked to make a statement or two how this whole process of FCAT discovery was planned as a 'creative chaos' reform to 'loosen' up the bureaucratic, stodgy and irrelevant public school sector.

Sure, the testing methods might be a bit off. However, as mentioned in the article on jax.com, "officials complained of a more rigorous testing material/content"....for crying out loud, heaven forbid we raise expectations. Then again, we can only teach to the slowest student in the classroom and with budgets dictating "all inclusive" classes to save buck, smart Johnny will not progress or be pushed to excel because stupid Bubba can't keep up because is placed in the wrong environment.

I've said it before and said it again...simple interest by parents will increase a child's aptitude and intellect. How many parents take 30-60 minutes a day and engage and participate with their kids in either assigned homework or an additional learning material? How about just reading with to them or with them? It starts at the house.